3 Steps To ReduceYelling At Your Preteen When Frustrated.

Yelling at your preteen daughter can feel like a vicious cycle, leaving you both feeling frustrated and disconnected. What if you could break free from this cycle and foster a more peaceful family environment? 

Esther offers an insightful perspective on understanding why you want to stop yelling, whether it's to avoid the misery it causes, end generational cycles, or enhance your emotional well-being. She reassures you that there's nothing inherently wrong with you; it's about learning new skills to manage discomfort.

Tune in to discover actionable strategies to manage your triggers, such as disorganization and sibling fights, and practical tools like journaling, deep breathing, and meditation. 

Esther emphasizes the importance of understanding your thoughts, crafting a plan, and anticipating obstacles. By reflecting on your progress and practicing patience, you can form healthier habits and maintain clarity on why reducing yelling is essential. 

This episode is packed with thoughtful advice and real-world strategies to empower you on your parenting journey and strengthen your relationship with your preteen. Don't miss out on gaining these valuable insights to foster a happier, more harmonious family life.

https://instagram.com/the.help.moms.yell.less.coach

FREE GUIDE:

3 Steps to Reduce Yelling So That Your Preteen Feels Safe to Come To You, Not Fearful.

https://masteryourownwellbeing.com/3steps

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to Motherhood from the Brain, a podcast guiding moms of preteen girls on how to navigate emotional challenges that are not addressed in school. We share real stories, expert advice and brain-based methods for handling tough moments. Discover insights to create a deeper connection with your preteen and improve your motherhood journey. Let's tackle the uncharted territory of parenting together, hosted by professional, certified coach, E esther Mb abazi.

Speaker 2: 0:37

Hello there, mom. Welcome back to the Motherhood and the Brain podcast, episode number 24. My name is Esther Mb abazi and I am the host of this podcast. Before I begin, I just want to state a small disclaimer. I am not a psychiatrist or a psychologist or any other licensed mental health professional. On this podcast, motherhood and the Brain, I just share what is working for me in my life, what is helping me improve my life, my mental and emotional well-being, in the hope that at least I help one more person out there, one more person who is suffering, who is in the same place I was in those years ago, who thinks that there is something wrong with them, who wonders why they cannot get this together, get this. By this I mean the motherhood thing, the raising children thing. So I have gone before you. I am a little ahead. I used to feel awful and I got out there and I got help. So I share the things that are working for me. Hopefully they will work for you as well. In today's episode, I'm going to talk about three steps if you want to yell less at your kids. I did a webinar last year on this topic, so this was a one hour webinar and I'm just going to summarize today I'm not going to go through everything, I'm just going to summarize this talk on this episode the three steps that will help you less at your preteens.

Speaker 2: 2:22

So, as a mom, you are pulled in different directions. Your kid's behavior, or lack of behavior, is driving you up the wall. You feel overwhelmed and frustrated and, before you know it, you end up yelling, even when you do not want to yell. And all this yelling leaves you beating yourself up, feeling awful. You stay up awake If you are like me, you stay up awake wondering what is wrong with you, and you yell because you don't want to feel uncomfortable. But you end up feeling uncomfortable after yelling. It's like there's no catching a break here. Yelling is an action that we do to scare off something that our brain, our protective brain, perceives as a threat. But, like I said, after yelling we feel awful. So it becomes like this loop we cannot escape. This is what makes us weep who yell. This is what makes us wonder if there is something really wrong with us. I just want to tell you there is nothing wrong with you, nothing. All you just lack is skill. You yell when you feel uncomfortable Instead of being with the discomfort your brain results to yelling, it is because you have been doing it over a long period of time, so your brain knows this path. Your brain knows this very well. It is easier for the brain to yell other than stay uncomfortable. So when you learn the skill of not yelling by being uncomfortable, the yelling will stop. I know it does not make sense when I say it like that, but trust me, that is only what it requires.

Speaker 2: 4:12

So if you don't want to yell at your kids anymore, or at least if you want to yell less, the first thing you should do. The first step is to sit down and find out why is it important to you to stop yelling? Could it be because yelling at your preteen causes you and her more suffering and misery? Or do you want to end generational cycles of yelling? Perhaps you have painful memories of being yelled at as a young girl, so you do not want to subject your kids to the same memories. You don't want to subject them to the same pain that you went through. This was me, and this was my reason why I decided to end it.

Speaker 2: 5:06

Or maybe you are tired of your emotional well-being being dependent on your children's behavior, and what I mean by emotional well-being being dependent is when your kids are yelling. When your kids are behaving, you feel good. When they are not behaving, you try to do something out there to make them behave so you feel good. This is what I mean by your emotional well-being being dependent on your kid's behavior. Maybe you want to stop yelling because parenting disagreements are starting to negatively affect your marriage. Maybe your spouse is not a yeller right, and every time you yell at your child, you have a side argument with your spouse about yelling. So maybe you want this to stop. I know people who had this reason. When they were coming to me, they started to see that their marriages and relationships with their spouses were starting to get affected because of the yelling. So this is what drove them to seek solutions.

Speaker 2: 6:07

Or maybe you want to have a good relationship with your daughter when she's grown up, even now, even before she becomes a teenager, because the work that builds that relationship starts today. It started yesterday. Actually, it does not start when she's older. The bricks are laid today, the bricks were laid yesterday, the bricks for better relationship in the future. It started yesterday. It does not start in the future. So maybe you came here. You want to stop yelling at your kid because you want a good relationship or you want to feel good about yourself.

Speaker 2: 6:44

For people who do not yell, they do not understand that we feel awful. Like yelling has this guilt and shame it carries with it. You yell and then you feel awful, you feel guilty, you want to hide. So maybe you want to end that and you want to feel good about yourself Again. I just want to say there is nothing wrong with you. You are not broken. You only lack skill. Because I don't know where you went to school and how many years you went to school. I went to school for many years, to school for many years. My education is in oncology. I am an oncology nurse and we studied a lot of things all through the years and I never learned anything about the brain, anything about how our actions and lack of actions and how our emotions and thoughts and everything are driven by the brain. I never learned that. That I learned from the school of life.

Speaker 2: 7:51

So you have to be patient with yourself. Patience is really important. You have to tell yourself the truth. If you have been yelling for a long time, you are not going to stop yelling in a week and you have to be willing to do it over and over. You have to remember your why. When things get tough and they will just like learning a skill things will get tough and you will want to give up, but you always have to go back to why you want to stop yelling. Let me give a side example. If you want to start to learn a new language, you cannot expect to learn a new language in a week. No, you have to keep practicing, and I know many of us who are type A like we want. We give ourselves a schedule and days to learn and do things, and when we do not do them in the time frame that we have given ourselves, then we want to give up. I just want you to be aware from the get-go that it does not work like that. You have to be willing to try over and over again, and the way you'll be willing to cry over and over again is to go back to why you want to yell less or stop yelling.

Speaker 2: 9:18

Now imagine a scenario where you come home from a day of meetings. You come home from heavy traffic. You come home. Maybe your boss was not so good to you, maybe your co-worker, whatever something, maybe your client something happened at work. Boss was not so good to you. Maybe your co-worker, whatever something? Maybe your client, something happened at work. So you come home and your 11-year-old, 10-year-old, 12-year-old, 8-year-old meets you at the door and yells at you for something that she thinks is your fault. Is your wife strong enough for you not to yell back at her, or are you going to reactively yell back at her? Think again If your why is not strong enough and you want to yell at her, then you have to go back and look at why you want to do this.

Speaker 2: 10:10

So the first step is to sit down and write your why. It may take you time. For some people they need to dig around. For some of us it was very immediate. So step two you have to plan ahead of time.

Speaker 2: 10:29

When you come home from a busy day at work, from a busy day in your business, and you think you'll just get through the evening when you are exhausted, if you do not plan, your protective brain will take over and you will yell at the slightest irritation. You have to create a plan before the yelling occurs. You use your thinking brain, your planning brain, to make decisions ahead of time. The protective part of your brain is used to yelling. When you get home, it is a familiar pattern. That is why you need a plan in place. The only way to manage the protective brain is to have a plan in place.

Speaker 2: 11:20

When you get home, the protective part of your brain is going to tell you that there are backpacks all over the corridor, there is half-eaten food on the kitchen counters, there is things strewn around the house. The protective brain knows this. This is like a familiar pattern. It is going to be pointing those things at you and your protective brain is going to offer you thoughts like why can't these kids speak up after themselves? I am so sick and tired of repeating myself. These kids are very disrespectful, all those things. It is important that you do not pay attention to these thoughts, because the primal brain is trying to take the easy way out and this is not what you want. Let me repeat it is important to plan ahead of time because your primitive brain is familiar with the pattern.

Speaker 2: 12:26

When you get home, you get upset. The primitive brain knows this very well. So when you get home, it is going to be showing you things that usually upset you. So you need to have a plan. So you need to sit down and think what can I do? That is an improvement for me. Instead of yelling today, okay, I can pick up the backpacks from the floor myself, or I can ask my kids to pick them up, with the awareness that they may refuse. I will feel disappointed, I will feel angry, but I will be okay. The third one is I could leave the backpacks on the floor and go and do my thing. I could leave the food, like the half-eaten food, on the counters. If they refuse to clean up for themselves, I can just leave it there and go take a breather. So the third step is to anticipate obstacles. Think ahead of all the obstacles that might come up.

Speaker 2: 13:35

We do not want the protective brain to take over decision making, because it will always choose yelling, because this is what it knows. It knows that when you come home and you find things in disarray, not in order, you will feel agitated, you will feel frustrated and you will yell. The brain knows this. So you need to be ahead of that. You do not want your protective brain to take over decision making, because you will end up yelling. So you sit down again and you write to yourself what would be the reason or reasons why I might yell at my child today.

Speaker 2: 14:23

Okay, when she does not organize or clean her room, when my child does not get in the car on time in the morning. And on time is a very blanket statement because kids do not understand time the same way that we do. So it is very, it is very lowering. Okay, when she argues with me about homework, when my kids fight each other, you have to list the things that normally lead you to yell. Maybe when she criticizes your, your food preparation skills, like you know all the things that lead you to yell at them. So you list all these things. You try to get ahead. So what are you going to do not to yell, given those things that you have listed down, what are you going to do so you do not yell? You could get support through maybe coaching.

Speaker 2: 15:23

You could journal, but journaling is also a little it's a blanket statement, because just journaling without changing your thoughts will not get you any results. But it's better than nothing. So you can journal and usually journaling helps show you a pattern. It shows you a pattern. It shows you what is going in your head. It shows you how mean you are to yourself, because many of us are very mean to ourselves, and journaling will bring that out for you. It will show you how you speak to yourself, how you speak to your children. At least journaling is better than nothing, but only journaling without looking at your thoughts and understanding that your thoughts lead you to yell. It's not very helpful, but it's better than nothing. So you could journal. You could journal. And deep breathing also helps. Deep breathing helps like stop. It creates space between you and the thing that is stimulating you, that is leading you to yell. Maybe you could try meditation.

Speaker 2: 16:31

You have to write down what will you do instead of when you feel like you want to yell. Maybe you could try meditation. You have to write down what will you do instead of when you feel like you want to yell. What are you going to do? And there's something I say coaching, but through coaching I teach my clients how to be with the urge to yell. I teach them how to be present with the urge to yell. This is the best thing I found that helped me. You have to learn to be present with that urge. And by present I do not mean using willpower, no, I do not mean distracting yourself and looking at on your phone. No, you sit with the urge, and so that is what we do in coaching.

Speaker 2: 17:17

So when you have finished writing down what you're going to do not to hear, you have to go back to your why, because you are going to encounter resistance. This is a new thing. Encounter resistance, this is a new thing. Imagine you are on a trail, if you like, like walking, taking walks in the park and in the woods and stuff forest. Imagine when you go in the woods there are already trails in there that lots of people have been traveling on and walking on, so those trails are well formed. You don't have to carve out a new trail in the forest. It's always there. You just go and just walk on it. So when you are learning to yell less, you are carving out a new trail in your brain. So you are going to encounter resistance because the protective brain is very wary and skeptical of new things. Now you are moving away from what the brain is used yelling at every little thing to being uncomfortable, not giving in to the yelling. You are carving a new path. So you are going to encounter resistance.

Speaker 2: 18:35

And when you encounter resistance, when you don't want to yell and your brain is telling you don't you see what she's doing? Don't you see? Are you just going to let her be like that? Are you just going to look at her? What kind of mother are you? What are you doing? You're feeling like your brain will throw all these at you.

Speaker 2: 18:52

Always go back to your why. Always go back to your why. Remember when you were learning to drive if you drive, you did not just read the manual and hoped to be a better driver. You did not just read and you started driving a car. No, you practiced and you practiced and you practiced. So it's the same thing. If you want to yell less, you have to practice. You encounter resistance. You go back to your why, why you don't want to do this. I mean why you want to do this. You encounter resistance. Your brain is showing you all the other alternative ways. You stick to your plan and before you know it, it will become like second nature.

Speaker 2: 19:43

But the most important thing is to spend time getting clear on your why. Get clear on why you want to stop yelling, because when your why is clear, even when the resistance comes, you will know it's just temporary. You will know that you have to go through a few uncomfortable periods before you are on your path, before you carve out a new path. There are going to be days where things go very smoothly, where you will not yell and every time a situation presents itself and you don't yell, write it down. There will be days when things will go sideways and you will yell. The key distinction between momentarily losing your temper and fully reverting to the old yelling habit lies in your thoughts. You know how we like thoughts on this podcast. This is very important. I'm going to repeat there will be days when things will go sideways and you yell. The key distinction between momentarily losing your temper and fully reverting to your old yelling habit lies in your thoughts. So you reflect on what happened when you yelled, learn something from it and continue going. Learn something from it and continue going. And the best way to reflect is to write down, like you journal, like what happened right before you yelled. Then you journal, observe where you went wrong and continue going. Eventually it will become like second nature to you. So the three steps are figure out your why, create a plan before the yearling occurs and anticipate obstacles.

Speaker 2: 21:41

These are the schools that they don't teach us in school. We learn them from the school of life, and it's very funny how we all expect to just give birth to children and know how to raise them, when everything else we learn in school. We have to go to school and get some form of schooling, whether it is formal school or informal school, but many things. We go out there and learn the skill but one of the most important skills of raising another human being. No, we want to just figure it out on our own and of course we don't.

Speaker 2: 22:16

We fail. We are expected to know how to communicate with kids whose brains are developing. Their hormones are surging all the time up and down, because the areas in the brain that are responsible for hormonal regulation are under development. But we are expected to know how to deal with them. Like we expect ourselves to know these things and when we don't know, we beat ourselves up. And when we beat ourselves up we feel awful and we yell some more.

Speaker 2: 22:48

Isn't it interesting when we expect ourselves to know things that we have not really taken time to school ourselves in or to get help in? This is one of the reasons why we keep yelling, because when we fail, we think there's something wrong with us and then we yell some more, and then we yell and then we feel awful. So it becomes like a loop. So go practice. Remember your why. Why do you want to do this? Why it is very important. When your why is strong, the how becomes easier. Thank you so much for listening. Everybody, have a beautiful rest of your week. Talk to you again next week. Bye, everyone.

Speaker 1: 23:34

Thank you for tuning in to today's episode. Your time means the world to us. If you found this episode valuable, we would be immensely grateful if you could spare a moment to visit Apple Podcasts and share your thoughts through a review. Share your thoughts through a review. Your feedback plays a vital role in helping fellow moms discover our podcast and enrich their own motherhood experiences. Take care and bye for now.